Summary
Egyptian belly-dancer and actress, the true heir and disciple of Badia Massabni and, in Edward Said’s judgment in essay 31 of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, the finest belly-dancer ever — still active at seventy-five as an actress and political militant and, like Um Kalthoum, the remarkable symbol of a national culture (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.331).
Details
- Her debut was the lavish party of King Farouk’s wedding in 1936, at which Um Kalthoum also performed; it gave her a prominence she never lost (PDF p.331).
- Said found 190 film titles between the early forties and 1980; Tahia, asked in Cairo during the spring of 1989, could not remember the exact figure but opined the sum was well over 200 (PDF p.331-332). Both figures are held as given.
- Said’s account of the one full-scale cabaret performance he witnessed, at Badia’s open-air casino in Giza in 1950, is the essay’s centre: dancing to Abdel Aziz Mahmoud’s “Mandil-el-Helou” with lengthy immobility, suggestiveness over episodes and recurring motifs, and no bumping and grinding — sexuality as a public event, endlessly deferred, unconsummated and unrealizable, with a small self-absorbed smile Said found again in at least twenty-five or thirty of her films (PDF p.332-334).
- She discovered the role of almeh (literally, a learned woman), a courtesan of significant accomplishments of whom Edward Lane and Flaubert wrote; she is referred to as almeh in Li’bet il Sit (“The Lady’s Ploy”, 1946), with Naguib el-Rihani, and was subsequently fixed by directors as the other woman and, by the fifties, the standard woman-as-devil figure, instanced by Shabab Imra’ (PDF p.334-335).
- In the summer of 1975 Said saw her in Yahya al-Wafd (“Hooray for the Delegation”), written by her newest husband Fayek Halawa — a 220-pound swaggering bully in a vulgar farce Said read as opportunistic pro-Sadat, anti-Nasser politics (PDF p.335-336).
- A well-known Egyptian sociologist told Said she had been very close to the Communist Party in the forties and fifties — “the radicalization of the belly-dancers”; in 1988 she signed on to join the Palestinian ship el-Awda (“Return”), blown up by the Israeli secret service, as Said reports learning it; and she emerged as one of the leaders of a politically advanced syndicate of cinema actors, directors and photographers (PDF p.336).
- Visited in the spring of 1989 through Nabiha Loutfy, dressed in austere black as a Hajja, she gave her real name as Tahia Mohammed Kraiem, from an Ismailia family long active in politics, her paternal uncle killed by the British and her father imprisoned; “My life as a dancer has been beautiful, and I love it” (PDF p.337).
- She said Nasser had jailed her in the fifties because she had been a member of the League for Peace, a Moscow front organization; of the United States: “Liked the people, but hate their government’s policy.” (PDF p.337).
- Asked how many times she had been married, she answered “Many times”, and, asked which husband she had loved, “None at all” — “They were a shabby lot of bastards” (PDF p.338).
- Said closes: Tahia was her own history, largely undocumented but still magisterially present, and subversive to boot (PDF p.339).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Um Kalthoum, Edward Said